The Contrarian Investor: Why Japan is a ticking timebomb

Japan has always been a tricky subject for a self-confessed contrarian. It is a prime example of the columnist's conundrum, a poorly diagnosed but utterly chronic condition whereby newspaper columnists, CIOs and cross asset class strategists feel the need, at the beginning of every year, to pick an unloved market/asset class that must eventually ‘buck the trend' and surprise us all.

Japan (along with Russia) has been that market of choice and, until fairly recently, has also served to underline the dangers of the aforementioned conundrum - we get it wrong a lot of the time. But, boy, has the last year changed all that. My confession is that I have avoided discussing Japan in polite company, utterly convinced it was the basket case the markets were telling us it was until 2011. Yet even I have recently begun to express some positive thoughts about the land of the rising sun. More to the point, I rather slyly put quite a bit of my SIPP money into a Japanese small-c...